Cranberry Hootycreeks

You'll want to eat these cookies just because of their great name. It feels sort of.... I don't know, vaguely Southern and/or trashy or something.

I first came across this recipe looking for a neighbor gift for Christmas one year. It's one of those recipes that you can layer the dry ingredients in a mason jar and give it away with the recipe attached. Really cute that way. If you want some pics and instructions on that, make friends with Google.

Oh, and I recently saw a recipe very similar to this on the back of the bag of Craisins. That's how you know it's good. My ex-chef husband says that the recipes on the back of products are always the best ones because companies want their products to taste good when you bake with them!

Anyway, tangent aside, here's the recipe for the cookies themselves (from Food.com with my notes in italics):

INGREDIENTS

• 2 ¼ cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup softened butter
• ²⁄₃ cup brown sugar
• ²⁄₃ cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1 cup dried cranberries
• 1 cup white chocolate chips
• 1 cup chopped nuts (optional - I think pecans would be best here, but I've never made them with nuts myself)

DIRECTIONS

1. Combine flour, baking soda and salt.
2. Cream butter, then add sugars, eggs & vanilla.
3. Mix in flour mixture & oats, then cranberries, chips & nuts.
4. Drop by spoonfuls on greased cookie sheet.
5. Bake at 350 for 8-10 min. (Note: For my oven it took 12 minutes for each batch. You'll want to pull these babies when they look underdone in the middle and the edges are just starting to brown. In fact, I brushed my sleeve against one taking it out of the oven and obliterated it. So don't let them get to where you would consider them "done" when you take them out, or they will be way too hard once they're cooled.)

Makes about 36 cookies.

 YUM!